The Challenges of Exporting American-Style School Buses to Qatar

The RAND Corporation is selling the American school bus model to the Middle East, but it isn’t easy.

A decommissioned yellow school bus in Doha, Qatar. Credit: maniak713 on Flickr

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Researchers at the RAND Corporation are using the occasion of the start of the school year to point out their ongoing work to rethink Qatar’s K-12 educational system — and in particular, how they hope to reinvent school buses there. The California-based think tank has ended up recommending a system that looks a lot like how school buses work in the U.S.

That’s not exactly shocking. The American school bus has served as a model to emulate for some time now. When Canada and Dubai reformed their school transportation issues, for example, they based the changes off what they saw in the U.S. “Sharing” is getting a lot of attention these days (see: this blog), but many of us raised here had an intense and repeated exposure to a real sort of sharing in our formative years, when we hopped on and off the bus in pursuit of early learning.

But reimagining how kids get to school is a particularly pressing problem for Qatar. The country’s population, which skews young and urban, has more than doubled in the last decade alone. Development has yet to catch up. There are nearly 160,000 school-age kids in Qatar, many of them in Doha, the capital city where most Qataris live. In 2005 the country adopted a school choice system, which means kids increasingly go to school somewhere other than in their immediate neighborhood.

Those changes have added up to a call for a new way of moving school kids around.

To start, the uniformity of the humble U.S. school bus gives a lesson, beginning with its yellow color. Qatari school buses don’t hew to any particular hue. That and the lack of consistent safety indicators required in the U.S. — flashing lights, stop arms — means that they blend in with traffic. More than that, Qatar lacks a systematic way of signaling to citizens that they’re in the presence of school kids and should act accordingly. School zones in that country generally aren’t marked. In the U.S., school zone speed limits are capped at 25 miles per hour. In Qatar, whenever speed limits exist near schools are regularly ignored.

Those are simple enough design tweaks to make with a bit of paint and a few lights, and RAND is encouraging the Qatari government to make them. Far more complicated, though, are the cultural values and practices that shape how Qatari youngsters move around.

School trips, for example, can be exceptionally long. In fact, that’s one of the top reasons cited by parents for wanting their kids to travel by private car instead of bus. Qatari buses pick each kid up at his or her front door rather than at communal stops, contributing the the hours they have to stay on the road. Part of the reason is environmental: Qatar can get very hot. Waiting in the outdoors can be unpleasant, even dangerous, for children.

But much of it is cultural. Parents, RAND found, are resistant to the idea of “girls standing in the street where they can be seen by passers-by.” Add a general discomfort with mixing children of different ages, and you have a school bus system with few of the comforts of private transportation — though Qatari buses tend to be air conditioned and some have DVD players — and few of the efficiencies of public transportation.

Qatar is an intensely economically stratified country, but those Qataris with children in school tend to have options other than the public bus. Some 34 percent of households with school-age kids in the country report having a hired driver on hand. And while more than half of kids from driverless households actually do ride the bus today, only 13 percent of kids from families with paid drivers do the same. Not surprisingly, students, according to RAND’s findings, “associated riding the school bus with a lack of prestige, and thus many preferred to be brought to school by their parent or a privately hired driver.”

Class issues, too, come into play when it comes to the lack of discipline on Qatari school buses, which parents actually cited as their primary concern. School buses in Qatar tend to have monitors aboard, but they often aren’t Arabic speaking — many come from South Asia, RAND found — and get little respect from both students and teachers. Hiring Qatari women is pointed to as a possible solution, but the lack of prestige associated with serving as a monitor makes them unlikely to take the job.

School officials in Fairfax County, Va, the researchers report, “experienced a dramatic improvement in student behavior on buses” after installing on-board cameras, but those in the Middle East interviewed concluded that families would be reluctant to, again, expose girls to the views of strangers.

The humble yellow school bus is such an enshrined part of the American landscape that we might not think much about it. It’s a microcosm on wheels of not only decades of experience in designing shared spaces, but on cultural mores that emphasize the benefits of conscientiously mixing people of different economic stations and genders — even if it can sometimes get a little hot and loud.

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Nancy Scola is a Washington, DC-based journalist whose work tends to focus on the intersections of technology, politics, and public policy. Shortly after returning from Havana she started as a tech reporter at POLITICO.

Tags: public transportationshared citybuses

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